Network ring topologies are gaining in popularity, particularly in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. Such networks enable carriers to offer large bandwidth to users in a cost-effective manner. They also lend themselves to fast rerouting in the event of network failures, since two alternative routes in clockwise and counterclockwise directions—are generally available for connecting any two nodes on the ring. A drawback of traditional ring implementations, such as SONET/SDH, is that one of the directions is designated as the active ring, while the other direction remains on standby for fault protection when needed. In other words, at any given time, all of the nodes in the ring transmit and receive data only in the active direction. Therefore, ordinarily half of the available bandwidth in these rings is reserved for fault protection and is not exploited under normal operating conditions.
Some recently-developed bidirectional protocols provide more efficient bandwidth utilization by enabling data to be transferred between any pair of nodes in either direction around the ring. The two opposing traffic directions are commonly referred to as an inner ring and an outer ring. It will be understood, however, that in the context of the present patent application and in the claims, the terms “inner” and “outer,” as well as “clockwise” and “counterclockwise,” are used arbitrarily to distinguish between the two opposing directions of packet flow in a ring network. These terms are chosen solely for convenience of explanation, and do not necessarily bear any relation to the physical characteristics of the network.
The leading bidirectional protocol for high-speed packet rings is the Resilient Packet Rings (RPR) protocol, which is in the process of being defined as IEEE standard 802.17. Network-layer routing over RPR is described, for example, by Jogalekar et al., in “IP over Resilient Packet Rings” (Internet Draft draft-jogalekar-iporpr-00), and by Herrera et al., in “A Framework for IP over Packet Transport Rings” (Internet Draft draft-ietf-ipoptr-framework-00). A proposed solution for Media Access Control (MAC—protocol layer 2) in bidirectional ring networks is the Spatial Reuse Protocol (SRP), which is described by Tsiang et al., in Request for Comments (RFC) 2892 of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). These documents are incorporated herein by reference. They are available at www.ietf.org. Using protocols such as these, each node in a ring network can communicate directly with all other nodes through either the inner or the outer ring, using the appropriate Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of the nodes.
When a node detects a fault in a ring network (typically due to failure of a segment or of one of the other nodes in the network), it sends a failure alarm around the network to the other nodes. Based on the alarm location, each of the nodes must decide how to handle data flows that it is transmitting. Various protection mechanisms are known in the art for dealing with such failures, such as wrapping traffic from one of the rings onto the other in order to avoid the failed node or segment, and steering traffic at each node away from the failed node or segment. It is generally required that the protection mechanism take no more than 50 ms to start operating following occurrence of the fault, in line with the standard performance of SONET/SDH rings. Therefore, each of the nodes must be capable of deciding rapidly whether or not it is necessary to divert its current data flows from their previously-determined paths. In order to conserve bandwidth, it may even be desirable to stop a given flow entirely if the destination node has become unreachable due to the fault.